Miserable in Manhattan
by Mill Girl
Summary: Valentine's Day fast approaches and Andy seems to be getting rather a lot of mail. This is the second of three little short pieces I am writing to cheer up some stormy weather and February blues. They connect with each other and follow the much longer stories I have recently posted, all in the same AU.


Author's note. As with all my 'Mirandy' stories, of course I do not own these characters.

This is the second of three little fluffy shorts to amuse you for Valentine's Day. They are part of a much longer series of consecutive stories, beginning back with "Cuffed", and leading up to Miranda and Andrea's wedding which will hopefully happen in May. Please read and enjoy! Feedback, and favourites are always warmly appreciated. Thanks for all your encouragement.

"Unbelievable!"

"What?"

Andrea Sachs was wiping her puppy's paws under the faucet, and trying to dry them off with a paper towel. Her back was turned and her mind distracted, so she didn't see Miranda come into the kitchen and fling the day's mail down on the table.

"Ten more red envelopes!"

"For you?"

"Oh yes, sure! No for you! Is there something you're not telling me here?"

Andrea turned, Matilda, her white fluff-ball of a little dog, licking her face as she did so, and laughed nervously.

"Oh."

"Oh? Is that all you can say? Aren't you supposed to be engaged to me? Aren't I the object of your affections?"

"I think this goes back to last year. They've just updated my address somehow."

"Here, give me that animal and explain all of this before I have a nervous breakdown. It isn't even Valentine's Day yet, and that makes sixteen cards in total. It's too much to bear!"

"Very well. Here you are Tilly, go to Mommy M while I open a few of these."

Miranda took the puppy, sat down with a heavier than usual sigh onto a kitchen chair, and watched as Andrea reached for a paper opener. She looked impatiently for an answer to the mystery.

"Remember this time last February?" asked Andrea.

"Of course. It was the time of the infamous school piano recital which I missed, when I made you cry."

"You did, and I was a very unhappy bunny as a result. Fashionable, skinny and well-dressed maybe, but unhappy. Nate didn't even appreciate my new look, and I thought you hated me and were about to fire me. I really wanted to crawl under a stone. So I joined an online Valentine's Anonymous group."

"What nonsense are you talking, darling?"

"It's for real. Just for loveless idiots. You join online, submit your details and then agree to send a valentine to a name on a list, in return for which someone or other might send you one. You're allowed to say something about yourself, but no pictures. Then for a small fee the website will forward all your responses to you. I must have renewed my subscription automatically. Sorry, Miranda, it doesn't mean anything. It's just for sad losers who have no-one to love them, but it gives something to put on your office desk, or on your mantelpiece if anyone calls."

"But why have you received so many?"

"They must have liked my blurb about myself, felt how pathetic I sounded. I bet the script is still up there. I'll go and cancel it now, take it down."

Miranda put Matilda down on the floor, now that her little paws were quite dry, and firmly took Andrea's wrists, pulling her onto her lap.

"I want to see what you wrote. Now."

Andrea went pink with embarrassment. "No, it was really lame, full of self-pity. I . . . . "

"Now!"

Andy sighed. She knew Miranda wouldn't rest until she had witnessed the depth of her shameful crush from the previous year.

"Oh very well. I'll fetch my lap-top."

When she came back, she sat beside Miranda and found the website. She then reluctantly brought up her profile.

"What did you call yourself?"

"Miserable in Manhattan."

Miranda laughed out loud.

"Well show me what you wrote."

"Here, read it for yourself. It's too cringe-making for me to look at it again."

Miranda reached for her specs and stared at the screen. She read the words aloud.

"Have you ever been in love with someone so far above you, you need a telescope to even glimpse them? Have you cried night after night for a dream so impossible, it could never come true? Have you wanted to lie down in the snow and let someone's boots stamp on you and turn you into slush beneath their feet?

"God, Andrea, this is pure purple prose . . ."

"Go on. It gets worse."

"Have you cried when they unthinkingly hurt you, cried even harder when they occasionally praise you?"

(Andy broke in. "Well that bit was fantasy. Up to then you never had praised me!")

"If you have, you will know how I feel. Loving my boss, without any hope, without even being able to express a tiny part of how I feel. This is my life, my hell, my heaven, my destiny."

Miranda finished reading aloud and went very quiet.

"I told you it was appalling."

"Hmm. And you really felt this? Back twelve months ago?"

"Yes. I am so sorry. You have engaged yourself to an emotional moron."

"How many cards did you receive last year?"

"Oh, only about three, but I posted on Valentine's Day itself. This year, people must have felt super-sorry for Miserable in Manhattan. I'll stop it at once, of course."

"You know what I think?"

"What? Please don't despise me as much as I despise myself!"

"I just . . . "

"What?"

"I just wish we hadn't wasted all those months from October to July. Do you want to know what I would have written, not that my prose is quite as fine as yours?"

"You? You wouldn't have wasted the ink!"

"Oh yes I would. I'd have called myself "Most Miserable in Manhattan" and I'd have said the following. . . "

Here, Miranda put her arms round Andrea's shoulders and pulled her towards her.

"I am a downhearted dragon, living in a cage made of old bones, and venomous viciousness. Every day I gaze on, and work alongside, someone so beautiful, inside and out, that I cannot imagine why she wants to breathe the same air as me. I want to whisper words of love to her, but only fire comes out. I know she fears and hates me, whereas I worship the ground she walks on. She fills my dreams at night, and my thoughts all day. I am lost in her, quite lost . . ."

"Oh Miranda."

"I know."

"So you were my Valentine, even then?"

"Yes. From the first day in fact."

"Me too. I loved you from the start."

"So, please stop all these red envelopes coming."

"I will. I will tell them I have had my happy ending."

"Not so much an end as the beginning of something neither of us can imagine."

"So we're still going up to Provincetown for a few days?"

"Of course. By the way . . ."

"What?"

"Would you really like me to stamp all over you in my boots?"

Andrea laughed and lifted her throat in that certain way which made Miranda want to eat her alive.

"Miranda, really! . . . Well, maybe, perhaps yes, just probably not your stiletto ones though . . ."

" . . . . "

The End.


End file.
